Driving Terror

Karen Robert is an associate professor of history at St. Thomas University, where she teaches courses on Latin American history, world history, research methods, and global automobility. She recently translated Memories of Buenos Aires: Signs of State Terrorism in Argentina, a comprehensive guide to hundreds of memory sites relating to Argentina's last military dictatorship.

"Before the darkened-windowed SUV became the preferred vehicle of the world's death squads, there was the green Ford Falcon. Karen Robert's extraordinary Driving Terror tells the story of how Argentina's anticommunist military region of the 1970s turned an object associated with middle-class pleasure and working-class pride into an instrument of terror. A wonderful, creatively and thoroughly researched book that details how the Cold War was, in places like Argentina, a class war." - Greg Grandin, author of Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City "Driving Terror is a groundbreaking social and political history of the Ford Falcon, a vehicle that epitomized mid-twentieth-century promises of prosperity and development and became an enduring symbol of state terror in Argentina. Karen Robert's fine-grained analysis draws on an impressive range of sources and newly declassified records to reconstruct the contradictory meanings of the Falcon, moving from the factory floor to the corporate board room, to the halls of justice. This is an essential book about a notorious chapter in Latin America's long Cold War and its legacies." - Jennifer Adair, author of In Search of the Lost Decade: Everyday Rights in Post-Dictatorship Argentina "Few objects can encapsulate the history of twentieth-century Argentina as perfectly as the Ford Falcon, and Robert uses it effectively as a connecting thread to write a multilayered story of the company, the car, the workers, the military repression of labor, and the search for justice after the fall of the last dictatorship." - Natalia Milanesio, author of Destape: Sex, Democracy, and Freedom in Postdictatorial Argentina